Roots of visual mapping

RClariana at psu dot edu 2010-04-20 22:43:30
National Public Radio – Mind mapping described in 1924

Excerpt form a letter written by Jacques Raverat to Virginia Woolf September 1924 from Vence, (Vence is in the south of France, just 10 miles north of Nice) as reported on NPR on May 23, 2004 by LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

`My dear Virginia, one of the things I find most difficult about writing is that it has to be essentially linear. I mean you can only write or read one thing at a time, and even memory doesn’t alter this fact. Now that’s not at all the way my mind works. When you write a word like “neopaganism,” for instance, it’s as if you threw a pebble into a pond. There are splashes in the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten corners of my past. You are not only a writer, but a printer, and you’ll see how difficult it would be to represent this odd phenomenon. One could perhaps, in the middle of a large sheet of paper, write the word “neopaganism” and then radially bits of sentences like this: Shame at the absurdities of my youth. Apologies if they really annoyed you. But almost impossible to believe that you can have taken them seriously. A desire to defend it. A desire to counterattack. Etc. Etc. And all this you see simultaneously, though even so it’s only what happens on the surface.’

vic at mind-mapping dot org 2010-04-20 23:39:51
Excellent, thank you. This is even closer to modern mind mapping than the Williams’ example I gave in the article. It’s a good description for such an early time, and it makes me wonder if Raverat went on to put it into practice.

One of the debts that mind mappers owe to Buzan is surely that he not only made them concrete but used his great marketing skills to popularise them and spread them globally.